Chile - Santiago Urban Transport Programmatic Development Policy Loan Project

World Bank
August 2009

Ratings for the Santiago Urban Transport Programmatic Development Policy Loan Project for Chile were as follows: outcomes were moderately satisfactory, the risk to development outcome was moderate, the Bank performance was moderately satisfactory, and the Borrower performance was also moderately satisfactory. Some lessons learned included: lack of a holistic approach may result in emphasizing one concern over another, for example, focusing mainly on environmental and economic considerations may lead to a design with unnecessarily fewer and larger buses. However, fewer and larger buses reduce comfort and increase waiting times. Such a decrease in service quality is a disincentive for public transport use and will, at least in the long run, go against environmental and economic considerations. Hence, it is important that a design that includes user participation finds the right balance between environmental and economic considerations and service quality. Travel and network models are excellent tools to evaluate network designs, but over reliance on normative analytical tools that 'optimize' a network subject to a set of assumptions, especially in areas that assume behavioral changes, should be avoided. The modeling exercise also needs to include 'bottom up' inputs, such as information on the importance in terms of overall weight people give to transfers, waiting, and walking. The Santiago experience showed that it is not advisable to redesign the public transport network without considering the existing information on travel demand and destination available through the operators. Additionally, stakeholders' involvement in the network design process, especially the municipalities comprising the metropolitan area, operators and users, is essential, and the design concept for the network needs to be extensively modeled before implementation.

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